Thank you Focus Home Interactive  for sending us this game to review!

A Plague Tale: Innocence takes place in France in 1349 during the Inquisition and the plague. You play as Amicia, a 15-year-old girl who is from the well-to-do De Rune family. She has a five-year-old brother, Hugo, who has been seriously ill for most of his life and their alchemist mother is trying to find a cure for him. With her mother tending to Hugo most of the time, Amicia has a closer relationship with her father who teaches her how to use her slingshot to hunt.

It doesn’t take long for the soldiers of the Inquisition to arrive at the De Rune estate and slaughter everyone in sight. For some reason, they are specifically looking for Hugo and want him alive. I won’t spoil any details, but suffice it to say that the story is quite intriguing and is spread out into seventeen chapters.

Amicia, who hardly knows her brother, becomes his caretaker and they befriend other orphans later on in the game. Until then, there are plenty of Inquisition soldiers and rats to avoid making contact with. The rats are afraid of light sources so if you’re near fire or have a torch you’ll be okay. The problem with torches is that they don’t last very long, so you don’t have much time to waste while using one.

Soldiers are a bit harder to avoid. If they are not wearing helmets you can sling a stone at their head to take them down. They will bleed when hit and may die as a result. Compared to seeing people burned at the stake or eaten alive by rats, the stone to the head is not that gory. There are non-lethal approaches like throwing a stone at a jar to break it or into some armor to get the guard’s attention elsewhere.

Stones are a limited resource, but in boss battles, they tend to replenish after a short while. Along with stones are other resources laying around that can be used to upgrade Amicia’s equipment or concoct helpful potions that can put guards to sleep or make their helmets acidic so they take them off. Amicia will also learn how to start and douse fires with alchemy. Extinguishing the enemy’s torches makes them vulnerable to rat attacks.

If rats make you queasy, you may want to skip this game as they appear in swarms quite often. Other issues to take note of include foul language with every word imaginable and some blasphemy. The Catholic church is not shown in a positive light as one of their leaders is depicted as being power-hungry and willing to sacrifice other people’s lives for his goals. This church leader’s health is not the best as it appears that he’s suffering from the effects of a rat bite. You’ll see him getting blood injections from “volunteer” prisoners. As I mentioned earlier, there is a lot of bloodshed in this game.

The visuals in this game are astounding. While there are plenty of grotesque images to make you wince, there are some truly beautiful sights to behold as well. Sadly, many of the towns you visit have been preceded by Inquisition soldiers and have left bodies of animals and townsfolk laying around the street. There are also battlefields covered in bodies. As realistic as this game looks, I’m glad that I didn’t have to smell what I imagined it would have been like.

The audio portion is equally impressive with an exceptional musical score composed by Olivier Deriviere who has many AAA game titles under his belt. The voice acting with French accents is quite good too. I can see why many people are describing this game as a masterpiece.

I completed the game in a little over ten hours. Though the story is linear, there are some Steam achievements available for keeping your eyes peeled for flowers and gifts to collect. I could have done a bit more exploring in my playthrough it seems. Even with my 63% Steam achievement completion rate, I’m very satisfied with my time in this title. As fun as this game is, it does deserve its Mature rating and should not be played by younger children as the imagery could be nightmare inducing.